cover image Albert Camus and the Human Crisis: A Discovery and Exploration

Albert Camus and the Human Crisis: A Discovery and Exploration

Robert E. Meagher. Pegasus, $27.95 (352p) ISBN 978-1-64313-821-3

Meagher (Killing From the Inside Out), a humanities professor at Hampshire College, sheds light on Albert Camus’s “enduring contribution to today’s challenges” in this brilliant study. The author begins with what he considers a definitive moment in Camus’s career: his lecture at Columbia University in 1946 entitled “The Human Crisis.” In his remarks, Camus identified that “the years we have lived through have killed something in us. And that something is the old confidence man had in himself, which led him to believe that he could always elicit human reactions from another man if he spoke to him in the language of a common humanity.” Using this as a framing device, Meagher puts Camus’s thought in dialog with the myths of Sisyphus (with whom Camus shared a deep love of life) and Prometheus, whom he oft cited and who represents the crisis, and explains the intellectual importance of Camus’s activity in the French Resistance. Meagher argues strongly against the notion that Camus was an existentialist and an atheist, and makes a convincing case that a modern world in peril ought turn to “the moral clarity and prophetic wisdom” of Camus. Fans of the philosopher and those new to his work will find this full of insight. (Nov.)